How To Study The Bible

In, how do I say, selling Greek and Hebrew, one of the things I want to point out is that English is a very confusing language. Greek and Hebrew, by comparison, are actually simple to figure out how you pronounce things. Let me give you a for instance. Maybe you've seen this before. What does that spell? What does it spell? G-H is enough, right? Business is IH and motion is CH so it spells what?

Isn't that weird? English is a bizarre language. Can you imagine Heidi and Helmut having to learn this as a second language? It's bizarre. A piglet is a small pig. A toilet is not a small toy. How do you figure this stuff out? You've got a waiter and a waitress, an actor and an actress, but you don't have a matter and a mattress or a butter and a buttress. It doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm studying Greek and Hebrew, right? One of the things we went over last week is we talked about Greek. Let me move this down a little bit. We talked about Greek, that Greek had these different characters. You had tense, aspect, voice, mood, person, and number. Those aspects, those characteristics of the Greek verb.

In Hebrew, that we'll be taking a look at this morning, very similar except for one thing. Hebrew does not have, and this is common in a lot of Oriental languages, Hebrew does not have a real tight way of referencing things with respect to time. Greek has a very precise way of referencing things with respect to time. Hebrew does not. So that's just kind of in general one difference we're going to take a look at. You've got in front of you there an alphabet chart. and we're going to sneak up on it. We're going to sneak up on your chart.

What it turns out is that the various languages of Israel and the nations and cultures around it during that time, the various languages are basically quite similar. They pretty well figure, although nobody is quite got it nailed down, that there was some kind of mother tongue that it all came from. Hebrew is what the Old Testament is written in almost entirely. There are small sections in Aramaic, which is a related language. But Hebrew is this language that is very similar to the rest of them. Arabic is one we are seeing a lot of now, watching the Al Jazeera TV stations and all these funny squiggly lines. It looks different, but actually much of the structure is very similar between Arabic and Hebrew.

You'd think they'd get along better, but no. Anyway, this is kind of predecessor to the sheet that you have. And what it shows is that Hebrew letters, which are in this column, originally started from things that were more like pictures. You notice that this looks kind of like a cow's head? And eventually, over time, they developed into this. Now, what's one reason why the Hebrew letters would not be the same as these sort of picture drawings?

They were told not to make any graven image. So our language has to be different, right? We can't do like our neighbors did. You know the Egyptian hieroglyphics have all those pictures? Well, the Hebrews told you can't have any graven image. So they said, well, our alphabet's not going to be anything like the rest of them. Well, the truth is what they did is they sort of adapted it. But it doesn't look like fishes and men and cows' heads and things of that sort, see? So over time it's changed.

From the Hebrews, neighbors, the Phoenicians, they're mentioned in the Bible, the Phoenicians, those were the people who were really big into ships. They carried that language over to Greece, where the Greeks picked it up. And that's why you see the Greek alphabet right next to the Hebrew alphabet. The Greek alphabet is about two steps away from the Hebrew alphabet. Okay, so that's the similarity. Now, what you have in front of you, this is the one we're going to sneak up on, right?

This is how you pronounce these funny looking letters. Alef, Bet, Gimel, Dalet. Hey, Bob, Zion. This is not Chet, okay? You may have a friend named Chad or something. Forget that. It's not Chet, it's Ket. CH like in our spelling of chemical. All right. Let me give another example. Bach. Yes, here we go. Same idea. It's more of a K sound. All right.

Now, let's make some other comparisons. Remember when we were studying, good morning, remember when we were studying Earlier, and we'll see it again, in Revelation, one of the names given for Christ was, I am the Alpha and the Omega. Alpha was the first Greek letter, Omega was the last. The Jews would say, the Rabbis would say that God's name is the Aleph and the Tav. the first letter and the last. You see that? That's why you see in the book of Revelation, writing in Greek, he doesn't say aleph and pav. He says alpha and omega. And then to make it real clear, the first and the last. See that?

So the relationship between the two languages is even something that Scripture takes advantage of. A person could go through all that. I'm not going to approach having you memorize that. One thing to recognize, though, is that they write backwards. No, that's actually right side up. But it's backwards. They start at the top, but they go from right to left. So that's why you see these are the reverse numbers. And this is the first chapter of Genesis. You recognize it now? Yes, as a matter of fact, this is an amazing thing. It's one of the reasons to me why it is incredible evidence of the Lord's sovereignty.

Not only do you have a people who have been scattered all over the world, and have now after centuries, basically almost 2,000 years, been brought back together as a nation. And they had actually forgotten, for many of them, they had forgotten Hebrew about 500 years before Christ. They had forgotten it because they were taken where? to Babylon, right? They were taken to Babylon, they forgot their Hebrew, they pick up the language called Aramaic, which was what most Jews actually spoke once they returned, and even during the time of Christ, that was the common language with Aramaic. They were still speaking Aramaic centuries later. The Hebrew that is spoken in Israel now is the same Hebrew that was spoken and written 2,500 years ago. before the Jews left.

They learn and know as their everyday language the same Hebrew, with obviously some new things to handle automobiles and spacecraft, but they have learned and read the same Hebrew as the Old Testament is written in. So when the time comes, they will be able to read God's Word with full understanding.

Isn't that neat? What has happened is the Jews, as they were spread around the world, and the Greek term is the diaspora, they were spread around the world. The Jews have always tended to spread a bit, but the 70 A.D. and then the 132 A.D. rebellions in which they lost to Rome and Rome just scattered them, that put them in different places, so they picked up a lot of variations, and Yiddish is a variation that came up since that time. What is amazing to see, though, is that what the Lord has done with Hebrew to resurrect basically a dead language after two and a half millennia, and when the Lord was to spread Greek, obviously the whole world wasn't going to learn Hebrew, to spread Greek around in preparation for spreading the New Testament and spreading the gospel.

And one thing about Greek is it's much more specific as to time, when something happened, and something being permanent. So it was a much more effective language for explaining Christ died for me, and I am now eternally saved. It was a far better language to express that than Hebrew, because Hebrew didn't have what it takes to spell out those kinds of time references.

Yes, in Aramaic, yes. Parts of Daniel and parts of Ezra, both of those have sections written in Aramaic, which was the language that they came back from Babylon with, or in the case of Daniel, while he was in Babylon. There are also other words that come out of Aramaic that still kind of show up even in our Greek text of the New Testament.

What did Christ say when He was on the cross that they misunderstood? He did say that. Father, forgive them. But what else did He say? It's finished. He said that. But He said something else that they misunderstood. Remember He said, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani. That's Aramaic. And the reason they didn't understand it, they thought he was calling for Elijah, which is Elia. Eloi, Elia. The similarity in the words. They thought he was calling for Elijah. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani. Lord, Lord, why have you forsaken me? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So that's kind of the interplay between these languages. Yeah? Yeah. Correct. Oh, no, it's fully in. You go to Israel now and that is what they write, speak. You can buy the Jerusalem Post, which is in English. Otherwise, all the other major newspapers and the Post is not the number one. Aramaic is passe.

It's now Hebrew and they speak the Hebrew that's from the Old Testament. Yes, well what I'm saying is there will be a time, and we'll get into this in our main service study, there will be a time when the Jews, though starting out the tribulation largely as unbelievers, the remaining Jews will all be brought to belief and they will be perfectly prepared to read the Old Testament in Hebrew and see what their own prophets have told them about the time that they'll be living in and about Christ. There were always Jews that maintained it on a scholarly level, but when they came back as a country, that was a decision that they made. We're going back to Hebrew. The Aramaic was a compromise with the fact that they had been in Babylon. All the other languages, including Yiddish that Doug mentioned, All the other languages had been sort of drifting away from their original Hebrew. So when they came back together as a country, they said, we're speaking Hebrew here. Everybody's learning it.

May 14th, 1948 was the time when they were brought back as a country. Yes. The whole thing is miraculous. It is God's divine intervention. You find any other country that has been shattered and spread all over the globe to the point where they're hardly identifiable except as a tiny population and then brought back together in a country and then begin speaking the language that they spoke two and a half millennia before. You pick any other country like that in the world. There is no other. It shows that God chose the Jewish people. It shows God's faithfulness. It shows God's ultimate plan for them. It's absolute proof. There's nothing else like it in the world. I'd defy anybody to find it.

Yeah? Ah, good question. And you know, what's that? Oh, I thought you said Russian. I thought, oh boy. You know, that's a good question. And I don't know the answer to that. I don't know if Scripture ever spells that out. The question is, who taught Adam to speak? There's no explanation for that. There was a language there. There was no, what did you say, or waving hands. Any of that? Hello? There isn't any explanation given in Scripture for that other than it seems like it was right there.

Yeah. And the confusion came at Babel. I would guess from kind of the marking points, the milestones were given, creation and Adam and Babel, that between that time the whole earth spoke the same language. It was at Babel where the diversion of languages came, and likely came from a restructuring of people's minds. That's an interesting thing. But linguists have concluded that there was at one time one mother tongue, and that at some point, and of course if they're not biblical they don't point to Babel, but at some point in time there was a scattering of languages.

Yes, yeah, that's, you know, bottom line. Now, let's take a look at something else. I think one of the things that's valuable for us to take a look at and to think about is the fact that the Hebrew mindset, the Hebrew understanding of things is different. And that's probably, as we look at this, I'm not expecting anybody to start memorizing the alphabet here. But I think the thing to take a look at, except for you. The thing to take a look at is the Hebrew mindset is different.

They think differently about things. The Greeks were into philosophy and being very specific as to time. The Hebrews were much more of an agricultural, pastoral people. Their sense of being precise about time was not as important. They had much more of a practical and poetic mindset. But there's some things we want to take a look at in that. Let me make sure I've got all the parts and pieces here. This I don't expect you to see in detail.

This is an accommodation between our calendar and the Hebrew calendar. Believe it or not, we're now in the month of Kislev. The Hebrew calendar is a combination lunar-solar calendar. Basically ours is a lunar-solar calendar too. It basically started on a lunar cycle and then shifted to accommodate the fact that the moon and the sun aren't in total sync. What the Hebrews did, unlike ours where we have minor shifts at the end of years and we'll have leap year and things like that to accommodate the fact that our lunar and solar calendar are not in sync, what they did is they said, we'll stay on the lunar calendar, but every once in a while we'll throw in an extra month to make it up. So it kind of goes, gets out of sync, and out of sync, and out of sync, and then jumps back in. Just kind of like a film where you see the voice and the picture aren't in sync, and all of a sudden it'll jump back. Kind of like that. That's the way their calendar works.

So somebody will say, well, when is Hanukkah? Well, it depends. It starts anywhere from the end of November and continues into the beginning of January. and it slides around depending on where they've thrown that extra month in. So now, this year, you're going to have Hanukkah starting in another week or so. Then it will continue on through the end of the year. Then what will happen is that will shift That'll keep shifting and then they'll throw in the extra month and then that'll shift it back. And so it keeps drifting. Now, as opposed to the... Let's look at the contrast.

The Islamic calendar is totally lunar. It's totally loony. I mean lunar. And so what happens there, because there is no accommodation, Ramadan, which is now just finishing up today, Fifteen years ago I was flying an airplane sitting next to a fellow who was Islamic and it was June and they were having Ramadan. So Ramadan shifts as a time of year because they're totally on a lunar calendar. The Hebrews were on this calendar where they recognized the sun and the moon were not totally in sync and they put in a short extra month once in a while to make up the difference. How short? It's like half a month, like 13 days or something. I'm trying to think of what that is. Yeah, it's five seven sixty two. And I'd have to go back and look. I'm not sure offhand because it is curious because they totally on a different system. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that one. Well, it would have been earlier than that. Abraham was 4,000 years ago. And so it would have been prior to Abraham. And exactly what they clock it to, I'm not sure. So that's quite a bit before Abraham. Let's take a look at something else.

One of the things that is fascinating to study is God's name. The Jews had the name that we transliterate into English, Jehovah, right? Well, what they actually used was four letters, and we've sort of moved it over and thrown some vowels in there, so we call it Jehovah. Probably a closer guess as to the way it was originally pronounced was Yahweh, or something like that.

Now, the question is, what does that mean? Well, let's take a look at it. This is a little hard to read. This is how it's pronounced. And again, it goes like this, right? Basically, what they figured out, what we call Jehovah, Yahweh, is a contraction of I was, I is or I am, and I will be. That's God's name. So here's Moses. The Lord said, you know, tell them I AM has sent you. But the actual name is, I was, I am, I will be. He is eternal.

Now, given that, let's take a look. Open your Bible for Revelation. Turn to Revelation 1.4. Somebody read that for us. So the first part, what does it say? From him who is and was and who is to come. What we find is that same is and was and who is to come shows up again in verse 8.

It shows up again in Revelation 4.8, and we haven't got there in our main study yet.

And then in abbreviated form after that, who is and who was shows up in Revelation 11.17 and 16.5.

What that is is the Greek, it's spelling out in Greek God's name. It's spelling out in Greek what we transliterate in English as Jehovah. Because it gives the three tenses. Is, was, and the future it says who is to come. So here you have in basically five times in Revelation, it's the Greek way of saying Jehovah. Who is and was and who is to come.

He has in the Greek carried over the same thing, as best you can in Greek, as we saw earlier where he talked about the I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. He's trying to tell them in the Greek language the very same things that the Jews already knew. Now, something else. Open your Bibles to chapter 6 of Psalms. There's all parts and pieces here. There we go. Some of this has gotten a little faded here.

But let's start with Psalm 6.1. It says, O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger, nor chasten me in your wrath. And remember, this is a point we brought up previously.

Among the Greeks, and we inherited our culture so far as poetry and song from the Greeks. Among the Greeks, they wanted to rhyme the sounds. The Hebrews, we have little evidence that they ever even tried to rhyme the sounds. They wanted to rhyme meanings. Do you see that? They repeat the idea. What we try to do is repeat the sound at the end. Instead, they weren't trying to repeat the sound at all. They never even tried. They repeated the meaning.

Now, why is that helpful to us? It's helpful to us because when you translate it into English, it's hard to keep the sounds the same, right? But you can keep the meaning the same. Isn't that neat? That's the way the Lord designed it so that as we, not coming out of the Hebrew culture, get it, we can still get the meaning, which rhymes, and not worry about the sound which rhymes, which would end up kind of distorting the meaning. See? To me, it's just neat. This just shows the Lord's sovereignty, even in the language that He chose to have the Psalms written in. Farther down, Psalm 6-6, Every night I make my bed swim, I dissolve my couch with my tears. You see that? The rhyming of meaning, not the rhyming of sounds. The other example here is Psalm 104-33. I will sing of the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praise to my God while I have my being." See that? If you read through the Psalms, you're going to find that a very similar idea coming up again and again. And in fact, you will find it showing up even in the New Testament in places where it isn't quoting the Psalms.

You'll find that kind of repetition of ideas. As a matter of fact, it's that same principle that's carried forth Remember, we're studying kind of the different names or expressions for Christ in the letters to the seven churches. Sometimes you'll find two or three different descriptions. And what it's doing is it's saying, this is all describing the same person, but we're using multiple ways of doing the description. That's a Hebrew pattern. That's the way the Hebrews did it. So that's something as you're reading through the Psalms particularly. Look for that. Something else.

Because of the fact you know the meaning is rhyming, if you're not sure what it means, look at the next line. Because what it's going to do is it's going to give you sort of a paraphrase of the same thing. So if one line is not quite certain, use the next line. See if that is a rhyming of meaning to help understand the line you just read. Or vice versa. You find the next line a little bit puzzling, Look right before it. See that? I think that is also just another example of God's sovereignty and how the Lord wove these parts and pieces together to help us understand His Word. Just the very pattern that these people would use. Something else about Hebrew.

They were not in a hurry to say things. Our language, we tend to be very cut to the chase, concise. pointed and direct, they wouldn't mind saying something a couple of times, a few times if they had to, to get the point across. Because as far as they were concerned, they had all kinds of time. They didn't have these. So what would happen is they would kind of take their time explaining things and spelling things out. Now, one more thing, and that is There are places in scripture where you'll see kind of a broad description and then the timing will kind of jump back with focus on certain things.

Example, remember I threw up on the screen, oh boy I threw up on the screen, that's terrible. I put up on the screen the first chapter of Genesis in Hebrew, right? Then you get into Genesis 2 and what do they do? It's not a second version of how the world was created.

What they'll do is they'll repeat it. not just line by line, but they'll repeat the same theme, but state it with other details. See that? So, even though we're not going to be going into the fine details of the Hebrew language, just getting some understanding of, okay, they think differently, they've got a different emphasis on things, that'll help us as we're kind of studying passages, and I think especially the Psalms, considering it's so much poetry. It helps us to see, this is how they would go about writing things in their thought pattern. Therefore, we can use that to better understand it as we read it in English. What has happened, Doug brought up Yiddish. What has happened is over time, the Jews take their scriptures very seriously. Those that are Hasidic, that is, they are very serious about their Jewishness, they take their scriptures very seriously.

And they've broken up into several different groups, or two main groups. And each of those groups has a singing pattern with which they sing the scriptures. And some different ideas, because, I mean, not just Psalms. All of it. It helps them memorize it. Now, do you ever see pictures of Hasidic Jews with the old garb and they're doing this? There you go. They're doing this in beat with their memorized pattern. They go through the entire scriptures with those memorized patterns.

One of the things we've found is we've looked at the scrolls. Each page on every scroll, each individual page is the same for one scroll to the next. So it isn't like they just got through and then just went to the next page. They wrote this page and the starting point and the ending point is the same on this scroll as the next one that they copy.

I lost you? The starting word and the ending word. If I go, for example, to the top of the page in Genesis 1 in English, it says, In the beginning, and that's the same way it would start. And then at the bottom of the page, just to use the example here from the end of the chapter, the bottom of the page at the end of Genesis chapter 1, it says, and there was evening and there was morning the sixth day.

They would have at the bottom of the page the exact ending word on each scroll. So if I were to copy a scroll at the end of that one column of writing, there was evening and morning. the sixth day, when I would copy it, I would make sure it ended the exact same way. Each section is going to start and finish the exact same way.

They would also learn their singing of those pages and keep the meter right in time with it because as they memorized it, as they read it, as they sang it, those would all be in sync. That also helped make sure that when they copied the Hebrew Old Testament, their copying was impeccable. They counted the number of words and the number of letters in each book and made sure that when they made a copy that it had the same number of letters and the same number of words or else they would throw the scroll away. Each of the groups would sit down and they would learn. There were different patterns. They did end up kind of breaking the different patterns, but each one would learn their singing pattern for the Hebrew scroll that they had.

And they would sit there and they would sing and they would sing to the point where they can sit there and the book's gone and they're singing and doing this and they know exactly what the words are. They would memorize huge portions of the Old Testament because they would sing and focus on that as they're singing. Here's one other way that they would do it.

When the temple was still there, as they were proceeding to Jerusalem, they would go back and forth, and one group amongst them would sing one line, and then the next group would sing the next line back to the other group. And so as you were traveling, they would go back and forth and back and forth, and they would sing the psalms to each other, particularly.

Will you see in the Bible a song of ascent, or a psalm of ascent? That's what it's talking about because Jerusalem is up from almost everywhere around. And while they were ascending to Jerusalem, they would sing back and forth and back and forth to each other these different segments of Scripture. Yeah, Hebrew didn't have the theater, but they did that with the Scriptures explicitly. It may have developed from that. The Hebrews, their culture rubbed up against the Phoenicians, who then rubbed their culture up against the Greeks. So there's a lot of interplay between the two, even though there's a lot of opposites, too.

We've run out of time, but hopefully that will be insightful and interesting for you. Let's pray. Just what you have laid out here, even as much as we looked at this morning, it is abundantly clear that over the centuries you have sovereignly chosen the language in which both the Old Testament and the New Testament were written. Each of them is written in such a way that it's appropriate to the needs of that particular segment of Scripture. We see your sovereignty over the and your promises to the Jewish people and Lord in that we can also see your sovereignty and promises to us and your faithfulness and we thank you for that. We just pray these things in the name of Jesus our Lord. Amen.